LUCKY DUBE
Interviewed by Jesse I -- October 19, 1999

This interview was conducted via phone prior to Lucky's April 2000 tour of Australia. It was aired on Chant Down Babylon (106.7 PBS-FM) and used as an article for Beat Magazine.

JESSE: With me right now I have on a line a man who has a good claim to the title, “King of African Reggae”. Lucky Dube, thank you for taking the time to speak to us here on Chant Down Babylon.

LUCKY: Yeah man.

J: Of course, the country where you've been concentrating on chanting down babylon is your native South Africa. Where in South Africa do you live?

L: I live in Johannesburg.

J: Okay. Is that we're you're calling from now?

L: Yeah, right now I'm in the center of Johannesburg, yeah.

J: Okay. So whereabouts did you grow up? Have you always lived there?

L: No, I came up to Johannesburg round about 1982, which is when I first recorded my album. But I lived in a town called Ermelo which is about 260km south of Johannesburg. That's where I was born, that's where I grew up, stayed there for some time until 82 when I came up to Jo'berg and met Richard Siluma who was to be my producer you know.

J: Okay. Well, I'd like to go right back… as a child growing up under the apartheid system, what was your life like when you were young?

L: Well it was hell… I mean it was really hell for me also, because with me, I got, I would say, a double blow. Because of the system, the apartheid thing that was going on here, and of course the fact that I didn't have my father, y'know, I grew up without him. I only saw him for the first time, what three years ago. And yeah, the situation was just bad here, y'know, for me when I grew up. But we only started to realize how bad it was later in life, because when we were growing up, that was the deal, that was part of our daily life. That is how everybody around us grew up. That was just life. So we didn't see anything wrong, because the people that we grew up around were also in the same situation. So it's only when we grew up that we saw that we were getting some kind of a raw deal here.

J: So these days I know you're concentrating a lot on educating the people, sort of teaching them I guess what freedom can be.

L: Yeah man. Even though it's very difficult you know, because this segregation thing, or this hatred, has been buried very deeply in people's minds. You know, you try to teach people about freedom, and you try to teach people about doing away with apartheid and the whole thing, but people's minds are still somehow, hanging on to the past. That went on for a very long time, and I think that's why they're holding on to the past so much.

J: Well where was it along the line that you decided that you wanted to be a singer in the first place?

L: Well, I would say maybe from when I was about 8. Because at that age, I was doing, I was writing my own songs, and yeah, singing songs that I heard on the radio. And whilst talking with other kids who wanted to be a pilot, who wanted to be policemen, who wanted to be everything, my one was always being a musician. And really, I wanted to be a musician I think from the age of 8.

J: Well your international fame has really come from your reggae music, but your initial success wasn't from reggae at all was it?

L: No man. When I started, the first album was a mbaqanga album, which is the Zulu traditional music down here. So that's what I recorded first, and that's what became… or that's what gave Lucky Dube a name, in South Africa. But later in the years, it was clear to me that I didn't just wanna be here in South Africa. The music had a message, and the message had to be heard by people around the world. And so.. In 1984, that's when I made the switch to do reggae. Because I thought that reggae is the kinda music that everyone listens to everywhere in the world, and it's the kind of music that you don't grow out of. It's not like 60 years olds don't listen to reggae music y'know, it's music that everyone listens, and I wanted my message to be heard all over the world. That's when I made the switch from mbaqanga to reggae. Because in mbaqanga I was singing in the Zulu language, and as far as I know, the only country where there is like millions of people that speak Zulu is South Africa. So I was just going to be here in South Africa; the world wouldn't have heard. That would have appreciated the music, but not understood what the music said. What I didn't want was to have my music as some tourist attraction music. Y'know, like the music that tourists buy in any basically any country where they don't understand the music, where it's just like “wow, it's a nice thing”, but they don't understand what it says, it's just some nice thing, a tourist thing so they can say “I was in South Africa, and this is what I got, this music”. They don't know the artist, they don't know what he stands for, stuff like that, that's just tourist music. So I didn't want to be in that category.

J: Right. I know that your music… it's obviously gone to hugely to an international level now, but I know that at times it was often banned back in South Africa, is that right?

L: Yeah man, yeah man. That was one of the difficulties that I had down here. Because it took some time before people here could have the music freely, because most of the albums that we released were kinda banned by the past government, because of the message in the music. And so reggae was basically nowhere in South Africa. You couldn't just have reggae freely y'know. There were like no reggae bands in South Africa, the only reggae we could hear was like reggae from Bob Marley, Peter Tosh… or not so much Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, but we could hear a lot of Jimmy Cliff. Because mostly he would sing about love songs, he wasn't as militant as Bob and Peter. And so the albums really that I had here the government didn't like, so they were banned, which made it very for me to get through to people. Because at some stages it was so bad that if they found you say with a Peter Tosh cassette, they would lock you up. They would do things to you; they would torture you in many, many ways, just for having that tape. Because they knew that was the tape that was going to open people's minds, and people's eyes. So they would torture you, or even throw you in jail for months, or even years. And so people were not really into reggae because they were very scared of that same thing.

J: You mentioned Peter Tosh in there, and I know, he claimed the police tried to kill him at one time in Jamaica, and many people still believe that his murder was at the direction of the government in Jamaica. Have you feared for your own life in South Africa?

L: Yeah, at some stage, I, I did. Well, I still do even now. Because what happens is that a lot of people here would have thought that what I was against was the white government in the past. And that's not what I stand for – I don't stand for black or white, I just stand for the truth. And so if there's anything now, in these present government that is not going right, I would sing about that, and some people feel that maybe it's uncalled for. They say, “we have a black government now, so why do you still keep hitting at them, give them a chance, y'know, it's a black government, it's cool”. As if, what they're basically saying is that even the wrong things that the black government is doing should be right, just because it's a black government. And that's not the way I'm looking at it. Sometimes yes, you do step on some people's toes, and it's not a very nice feeling to be in that position.

J: Yeah, I know a lot of the songs that you've sung… some of my favorite songs are all about the crime and corruption, I know on the latest album The Way It Is you've actually got a song called “Crime and Corruption” and then all the songs “Taxman”, “Life in the Movies”… I guess there's a lot of people getting pretty defensive when they hear songs like that.

L: Yeah, with Taxman I had some people that really came up but not necessarily from the government as such, but people who are very close to the government people. Friends, and maybe families even, who call me and say “now why do you have songs like this”. And that is when money was just disappearing here. They say, there's been maybe 80 million Reigns that disappeared from the Department of Health or whatever. 80 million! No one knows where it went or what happened. And because I'm one of the people that pay tax, it's not a nice thing to hear that your money has just disappeared, and no one knows where it has gone. And then they say, well you shouldn't question that because this is the black government, and I don't think that's how, say, the president was thinking at the time.

J: Well another of your primary themes, while we're talking about this, another of your primary themes is obviously race relations, and another of my favorite songs of yours is “My Brother My Enemy” from the Trinity album. I think it's a brilliant song with a brilliant message – could you talk about that a little for us?

L: Well, as the song says, not every black man is my brother, not every white man is my enemy. It happened to me in the past that I've been in a lot of situations, bad situations, and you find that the people who are supposed to be my enemies, which is the white people, those are the people that would get me out of situations – situations where I've been put by black people who are supposed to by my brothers. So then I came to this one conclusion that I would only say a black guy was my brother if he acts like my brother. And I would say a white man was my enemy if he is my enemy, if he's done something wrong to me. But I wouldn't just hate a white guy because he's white, or just trust and love a black guy because he's black. It doesn't work like that with me. You're my friend because of the way that you treat me, the way we talk, you're my friend. It doesn't matter whether you're black or you're white.

J: Do you feel that race relations are getting any better in South Africa now, or are the effects of apartheid still lingering on?

L: Well it is still going on y'know, but it is getting a little bit better. It's not as bad as before. It's getting better but like I said this thing's been in the people's minds for a long time. Yes we manage to change the books, but we haven't changed the people's minds yet. That's going to take some time. Because like now, if a white guy somehow goes to Soweto, he might not make it back to town. If they see him – “wow that's a white guy, let's kill him”. For being white. Yet we've had situations sometimes, where some guys would be attacked in town by white people, and it would be like wow, these white people killed a black man, or attacked a black man, in town, blah blah blah. But if a white guy is attacked in Soweto for instance, it would be like oh, okay, the struggle still continues. It's like alright, it's okay, it's a white guy that got killed by black people, it's okay. It's only bad and racist if it's when a black guy is killed or hurt by white people. And so that still goes on, and some of the politicians, like in a way, encourage that to happen. Yeah. But that's politics.

J: Right. I know you've toured throughout Africa quite a lot. Do you find that some countries relate better to your message than others, or do you meet a sort of general or universal acceptance?

L: Well, in Africa, I would say maybe it's the same basically everywhere we go, because the things that we talk about in the music are things that people relate to. They're things that have happened to people here in Africa and they know what we're talking about. So it's not like I'm just talking about Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall, something that people don't know. They know these things, and I think they basically relate to the music the same way everywhere.

J: Well, of course the next stop on your tour will be back here in Australia. You've been here several times in the past, are you looking forward to coming back?

L: Oh yeah. We were there I think in December, but we were just passing through. We had some shows in Fiji and Tahiti, but just passing through, yeah. Now this time we're stopping.

J: Alright, sounds good. I've got fantastic memories of the last show you did back in 1995 on the Trinity tour. I wasn't old enough to get into the venue then, I was under 18, but I managed to get in with my Dad, with a fake ID…

L: <laughs>

J: We couldn't have enjoyed the show more, it was a fantastic night for both of us. So for the people that haven't seen you before, what can they expect?

L: Well, our shows have been known to be long, and very powerful. There's a lot of dancing, we're not the kind of band that just stands there, and all our backup singers are dancers as well. And people say it's an energetic show. And we'll just say it's a powerful show, it's a good show. Y'know, it's a visual show as well, not just necessarily audio, but visual as well.

J: Yeah, well I've gotta say, I'm really looking forward to it, and I've never seen the Melbourne crowd as excited as they are about this tour. Of course you're going to be playing with Burning Spear, have you played with him before in the past?

L: Oh yeah! We did some nice shows with Spear many many times, and basically… Wow, we've been doing shows with him like for maybe for the past 5 years or so, shows in America. This is the first time we've done something with him in Australia, but we've been doing stuff with him in America. And uh… We've learned a lot from him really, he's one of the guys today in reggae that we look up to. Because he's still keeping the real reggae, the roots reggae. He hasn't gone into the ragga or whatever, y'know; he's still keeping it real. Yeah, he's one of the living legends, and so it will be very nice to work with him again.

J: Yeah, well we're looking forward very much to seeing you both down here soon. I'd love to speak to you for hours, but we're running out of time, so thank you very, very much for joining us here today.

L: Yes man, and thank you, and we'll see you when we get there. And we hope this time when we get there, no fake IDs!